I’m sorry, I couldn’t make it all the way through. I’m sure you both mean well, but this whole episode was just ‘elite’-splaining to the nth degree.
Any point made here through this scholarly research has long since been made by the actual people living it in much clearer ways.
The hypocrisy of the managerial class is news to absolutely no one, and listening to self-described members of that class discuss it like they discovered it, and as if their unique discoveries might now allow it to be solved, is just too much for me. Especially when it’s following the ‘working class people of Ohio are dumb enough to think their cats are being eaten’ episode.
I started listening to Barpod in 2021 to understand what the hell had happened to the media and online social discourse. It’s been great for that and I will continue to subscribe. But the tone-deaf episodes, at least to my ear, are becoming a little more frequent in number.
Being born into the upper-middle-class does not actually make you smarter or more knowledgeable than other people, and that unfortunately feels like a reminder that is needed here.
I feel like you've invented subtext that isn't really there. Musa doesn't claim to have invented any of these concepts. The title of the book and the key ideas are all derived from earlier works. What he has written is his attempt to frame everything in a coherent way and according to his particular focus and interest.
"Being born into the upper-middle-class does not actually make you smarter or more knowledgeable than other people, and that unfortunately feels like a reminder that is needed here."
That seems like an extremely ungenerous reading of what he talked about, that maybe says more about you and your particular hang-ups than Musa.
“Being born into” is the operative phrase here and the thing about episodes like this and related content is that I don’t necessarily interpret them as people disavowing their birthrights. Musa came from a military family and grew into the upper middle class; personally I find this an even MORE credible background for critiquing self styled “elites”, since the mores and nostrums of that class that everyone is steeped in and just accepts at face value still sound odd to an outsider.
I just don’t think his framing is somehow coherent. I’m still struggling to understand why Musa has invented the phrase for the managerial class—one I can’t even remember at the moment because it’s so obscuring—that he did. I found this particular episode to be really navel-gazing and strange.
Okay, then that’s probably wrong. His *use* of it is not clarifying, then. I left this episode feeling unsympathetic to the argument. It may just be personal experience. I straddle the lines being talked about in this episode. I grew up poor and a farm kid. But I also got a college education and then advanced into the ranks of the DC administrative career class. And then I bombed out of that for reasons I won’t discuss here and now I’m a working class guy again driving for UPS. This conversation just felt…navel-gazing and almost like two guys feeling guilty about their current place in life and publicly airing their feelings of internal guilt. A little like the people who voluntarily go to Robin D’Angelo “trainings.”
What? I haven't read the book so obviously I can't give you a list of its every distinguishing feature, nor do I have the time to write you a literature review of existing works on the topic.
Do you apply this same bizarre standard of originality for every writer or just this guy? My suspicion is that you have latched on to 'unoriginality' as a line of attack because you decided you didn't like Musa for other reasons.
Be open about those reasons and engage on the substance of your disagreement, or quit hassling me.
I’m not the person you originally replied to, was just curious on what specific basis you thought they were wrong about “everything they said having long since been made by the actual people living it in much clearer ways.” No problem if you aren’t sure.
It's fine to rehash some concepts that were refrained and provided more clarity. That's how I view Rob Henderson. This is in that vein but I don't see what this author added beyond his own journey from uncrticial leftist to someone more thoughtful, which in itself is nice to hear.
Amen and Hallelujah! We get it already, woke libs are a scourge and a cancer and are ruining everything on the face of the earth. These media people and academics just can’t stop with the elite infighting.
The outrage about this episode is so unbelievably unwarranted. I'm going to bring this up any time someone here smugly proclaims how much better we are than the FP commenters. Did we even listen to the same thing?
Anyway besides that, as a member of the professional managerial class, I want to challenge their argument a bit. I do agree we're part of the problem, but the reason the reason millionaire and billionaires get the flack they do is because they give the instructions we have to follow. I see this constantly where I work where our wealthy clients want the cheapest product which usually translates to the most unethical product. What do you want us to do in that situation? Yes we are carrying out their orders but this is why we're complaining about them (covertly) in the hopes they will change.
That said are we a problem even without them? Yes but that's true of every class. Look at the working class people who oppose housing in their neighborhood because they think it will lead to gentrification. Why do we get shit on for not wanting housing but they get a pass? We're also not the only ones buying stuff off Amazon.
And segregation in NYC, I want to ask a question. When I grew up I went to a diverse school. But blacks hung out with blacks, hispanics with hispanics and whites with whites. Me the sole Indian/Asian was basically alone. Is it not possible that these patterns I observed could explain segregation on a city level? Maybe the (predominantly white) professional managerial class isn't to be blamed when the working class themselves self-segregate from each other. And moreover did anyone bother to ask them if they are upset with segregation? Is this just another case of elites projecting their values onto other groups?
"Diversity" as an unquestionable virtue, is 100% managerial class bullshit. People who've never actually had to live in an actually diverse neighborhood, raving about how everyone should want to.
I grew up in an area where my twenty-odd kid class in elementary school had probably ten different nationalities represented, including a Soviet/Russian kid at the time when that was a big deal, plus black kids bused in from poor areas across the city. In my twenties, I did a degree where I was probably the only person who could be called a "white guy" in the room. I think these sorts of experiences are an unalloyed good, and many Americans could use more of that.
It's not the same thing as shoving 20,000 migrants into a small town or sitting through a nonsense HR training or having to write a pledge of allegiance to Robin Deangelo in order to get a job as a physics professor. I think it's sad that those sorts of things have come to be associated with the word "diversity".
Yeah, agree. I grew up in military housing - but not officer's housing - and the way that working class kids of all the ethnicities got along and hung out with each other was pretty formative to my pro-diversity outlook.
Sadly it did not prepare me well for going to high school, where there were literal race wars.
There are perhaps that many total immigrants of all nationalities in the entire county. The number of Haitians is maybe 2000 at an upper bound. It's an order of magnitude off.
There’s no official tally. Mayor Rob Rue told CNN the city’s population has grown about 25% over the past three years, in part due to the arrival of Haitian immigrants.
Between 12,000 and 15,000 immigrants are living in Clark County, which includes Springfield, according to estimates on the city’s website. Of that group, an estimated 10,000-12,000 are Haitian, according to a July presentation from the county’s health commissioner, who cited data from school and social services officials.
Yeah it has its pluses and minuses like a lot of things. The reflexive "it only makes you stronger" is so galling, because it is obviously not true in a lot of situations.
Years ago worked at two different non-profits where everyone was a white lefty, lots of Jews with doctor/engineer husbands. At both places they felt the need to hire a token black employee, because it just seems so awkward having 12 white people at a left coded non-profit located in a big city.
And since they just do affirmative hiring and just grab anyone, the people are shit workers, don't work out at all, and then also call everyone racist and take 9 extra months before anyone has the courage to fire them because no one wants to validate being "the racist". It is diversity that very noticeably made the organizations less effective and a less pleasant place to work. And the fucking people hired apparently didn't like it either (though why you would so hate a job where you sat around all day doing nothing and rarely got called on it, I have no idea).
Yeah I thought the lines pushing the blame towards the middle class vs the upper were the weakest part of the show. The amount of power a billionaire wields is crazy. One of the few useful messages from the Occupy era was how the gap between the 1% and everyone else has grown massively since the 80s.
The "Amazon worker cages" seems like it would only fool people who never worked around heavy equipment. There are many times you are in a "cage" in an industrial setting and it's to keep you safe, not to trap you or whatever nefarious reason this guy suspects.
Edit: I talked to Musa on TwitterX and he basically said the issue was the high productivity requirements at Amazon. The cages are just symbolic. So in my eyes, this is an example of out of touch elites claiming to care about worker safety, while actually actively making them less safe.
Edit 2. He addressed this on TwitterX...but this makes him look like more of an asshole.
"I do wish I'd spent more time unpacking the example about worker cages, because a nontrivial share of commentators are like, "cages are for safety, don't you know anything about manual work" (I most certainly do! I worked for a little while unpacking freight when stores would get shipments). Not only is this something I understand, it's something that was not lost on any of the original reporting on the cages, even from journalists who never did manual jobs. Not one of the major players in this story failed to understand Amazon's justification that the cages were ostensibly for worker safety.
The point is, Amazon has a major safety problem (far outpacing all peers/ competitors), caused by their orwellian surveillance and discipline regime, and their extreme productivity demands. And their solution, rather than addressing those issues, is to cage up their workers more, to marginally reduce worker comp incidents without changing any of the underlying issues that drive their extreme injury rates and turnover."
I was assuming that folks were loosely familiar with this story, and could follow the point along, which is why I didn't unpack it. My bad. I unpack it here"
I'm not buying it. I've worked in a warehouse environment with cages and it was for security, I suppose in a broad sense it was for my safety (being safe from being accused of stealing) but it was a fucking nightmare to go to the toilet. I think this was by design but at the very least they didn't give a fuck.
Husband works in a factory environment and always has. He works with very dangerous machinery, he informed me he has never worked in a cage but rather the machines are partially caged.
Anything that would go over people's head usually had some type of cage to to prevent dropping stuff on people's heads. This particular cage was meant to go into robot only areas for repairs. The design is specifically safety based.
Yeah I grew up poor in a rust belt town with friend's parents who had worked in closed steel mills & tool and die shops. So I know a bit, and now see it from the other side of the PMC.
I agree that leftist elites talking about actual manufacturing is a joke. I also want to include right wing elites too. The desire to bring manufacturing back to the US, is a right wing trope, but not one of those elites would want to do that type of work. Elites live in elite world where life is beautiful all the time.
Is this about the Amazon worker cage patent? If so then some readers here have low knowledge of current robotics.
The possible reach around a robot is called the workspace, which is usually a spheroid volume for an arm. It’s an extremely dangerous space for a human to be nearby. Imagine a robotic hook catching a sleeve or worse. A car manufacturing line has a huge red tape zone with a healthy margin to stop people from getting close to robots performing a set script.
For Amazon the case is very different because robots are picking different items from different locations. Throw in an extremely fast picking rate and it can be deadly.
Don’t worry. Thanks to the knee jerk backlash there will be expedited robotics research to reduce human workers.
>(I most certainly do! I worked for a little while unpacking freight when stores would get shipments).
Oh wow real salt of the earth, right here. At least Jesse is honest when he says his only experience with non-media work was delivering pizzas for a week in undergrad.
If there were a definitive ranking of BARPod episodes, the "Jesse interviews someone" have to cluster at the bottom. It's just not the right format, and he's way too reluctant to ask challenging questions (unlike Katie).
Yes, sadly this was a Dave Weigel level snore-fest. As I said for that one, unless a guest is very interesting or funny in their own right, they should prepare a story about internet bullshit to discuss - that has worked very well in the past. >1 hr of 90:10 guest rambling : Jesse agreeing does not make a good episode.
By the way, I don't know anything about Al-Gharbi's views on Israel or anything else, nor do I care. It would be very unfortunate if the criticism of this episode was dismissed on these grounds. It was just boring.
This podcast seems to work best when there’s a lot of back-and-forth between the speakers, and in this episode, with all the long stretches of time where the guest was speaking, I ended up feeling like I was getting a lecture. I get that he’s a college professor so he’s used to doing that, but it doesn’t work for me when I think about the way Jesse and Katie usually interact.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I noticed a couple comments on the ep with Katie and Hadley Freeman saying they enjoyed the eps with Katie and guest more than Jesse and guest. I think it's that Katie tends to have guest hosts that she has a rapport with so there's more banter, whereas Jesse invites people he finds interesting and gives them space to make their pitch. Tl;dr - Jesse please just invite Helen Lewis next time Katie is away.
For what it's worth, this was a better episode than that one. At least in this case the factual inaccuracies were mostly in the underlying work and not the podcast itself!
I think for this type of guest, a good idea would be a "listener questions" segment. Of course, this would mean revealing the guests ahead of time. But it might make for some more dynamic discussion.
Katie has perhaps had better rapport with her guests, but it veers into circle jerk territory at times with the focus on UK gender stuff. I like that Jesse interviews a broad range of people.
>He lost me by trying to argue that millionaires and billionaires (who have more money than they need) shouldn't be blamed for their objectionable decisions, because the people who carry out the decisions (who do need money to live) are somehow more culpable, or something?
I don't think that is what he is saying at all. He is saying that the Columbia educated HR manager for Pepsi who is all about "# resistance" and "ACAB", and "intersectionalpalooza", has some real actual culpability for the systems they claim to so hate.
It isn't JUST the fault of the millionaires and billionaires. Which is right.
"He lost me by trying to argue that millionaires and billionaires (who have more money than they need) shouldn't be blamed for their objectionable decisions"
He just didn't say that? He did say that sub-millionaires deserved blame. But blame isn't zero-sum. If you pay me to murder someone, my culpability doesn't somehow make you less blameworthy. (I'm speaking morally, not legally.)
I think I don’t need to listen to an interview with a guy whose Twitter feed is all crying for Hezbollah. I guess there’s one issue that the woke and unwoke agree upon.
A quick search definitely didn't find any "crying for Hezbollah." Musa is an exceptionally thoughtful guy from a military family who lost his twin brother to a war in the Middle East. I can't force you to listen to anything, of course, but I highly recommend at least checking out his work.
The pedant in me is obliged to note that this is actually false-- the Nazis launched two big cross-border offensives into France and the Low Countries in late 1944 (the well-known Battle of the Bulge and the almost completely obscure Operation Nordwind).
I'm sure Darryl Cooper could explain that these were merely self-defense, however.
By coincidence, I actually learned the other day that there was a kind of Phase Two to Nordwind (Operation Winter Solstice), in which the Germans actually forced a Rhine crossing and established a bridgehead on the French side-- but unfortunately it took place in January 1945, so technically outside the temporal boundary of the joke tweet above. It achieved some initial success, but was almost immediately canceled after the Soviets launched the Vistula-Oder offensive.
Where was the ad hominem? The fact that I can't take someone who retweets garbage seriously?
So you chose to take that at face value without bothering to check at all and come at me?
This data is from a database that counts an attack as one episode regardless if it's 50 rockets lobbed at Israel indiscriminately or one precision mission drone by Israel. So a 50 rockets lobby that can hit 50 houses (or in a case a soccer field with teens playing that killed 12 Druze children) counts as ONE attack as well as one targeted strike against a Hezbollah munition depot.
I'm trying to be civil but your accusatory tone is really gross and I'm not sure I'm gonna be civil next time you respond because I don't have the patience for this nonsense anymore.
"from a military family who lost his twin brother to a war in the Middle East"
A tragedy in someone's family shouldn't make their ideas immune to critique.
I lost count of the number of times "as a <insert identity marker here>" was wheeled out in the first 25 mins of that interview. At which point I switched off and went back to reading the dozens of articles that have been published in places like the Jacobin, which say the same things but without using the relentless use of one magical identity shield or another
Forget it man, there’s a large chunk of your audience who unfortunately will never listen to anyone from outside their pro-Israel echo chamber. The irony is palpable.
"Americans celebrating the pager/ walkie talky bombings in Lebanon, that injured many civilians and killed a little girl among others -- even if you're the type of person who simply doesn't care about "those people" (and if you are, don't tell me) -- they should recognize this is a major national security issue."
Just for the record, this is not "crying for Hezbollah."
All available evidence points to it being one of the most precise mass strikes on a militia totally embedded in a civilian population.
And a sabotage of a military supply chain has a long history in warfare, though rarely this precise. This isn't some new 'major national security issue' - militaries around the world have incredibly strict vetting around suppliers for this very reason.
Given the obvious lack of critical thought that went into that post its a fair assumption to make that it was driven by an emotional reaction to how successful the operation was at damaging Hezbollah
This was almost the perfect operation. It killed or injured a ton of terrorists with minimal damage to civilians. If this doesn't meet the standards for proportionality than nothing will.
Which, of course, is the point. Israel is supposed to just sit back and take whatever Hezbollah does because.... reasons.
And I don't see how this is a US national security issue. Do we think Israel will be attempting to blow US soldiers?
> Israel is supposed to just sit back and take whatever Hezbollah does because.... reasons.
It's crazy that Jesse bends over backwards to try to be "nuanced" in such a blantely obvious situation.
The Islamic world, with 30% of the world's popuation, who have colonized 50 countries, put forth an upside-down notion that Jews, at 0.2% of the world's population are whiter-than-white people who have colonized "Palestine" to which they have no historic claim because they're really "European".
Even though polls show a solid majority of Americans support the right of Israel to exist, college campuses and elite bubbles like the one Jesse lives in, like to show that white is black and up is down and pretend that this upside-down world is plainly true.
Jesse won't call bullshit to their claims because he likes to be able to go to Princeton alumini events and mingle with their intellectuals. As Katie said several times "the only reason people go to fancy schools is so they can spend the rest of their lives telling people they went there." Being shunned from Princeton social circles would destroy Jesse's core identity.
Before condemning the lack of critical thought, did you read the full tweet? It's not about sabotage in general. It's about the same supplier being used by the US military.
Here's the rest of the tweet:
"The same company that sabotaged devices in Lebanon on behalf of a foreign government also produces stuff for our own soldiers, which could likewise have been tampered with by that same foreign government or others, as @lhfang
Let's talk about the over 8,000+ indiscriminate rockets that have been lobbed at Israel since Oct 7th, 2023. Do you want to talk about the indiscriminate killing of 12 Druze children by such rocket in northern Israel or nah?
Edit: finally got to a computer to edit this (when is edit coming to mobile apps?) since ZigZag so gently and calmly pointed out my hastily written comment was lying, of course implying ill-intent. Thanks ZigZag, never change!
Mossad could have put a lot more explosives in there if they wanted collateral damage. We have no idea how many people who were not Hezzbollah were harmed. We certainly can’t trust their numbers. Harming only someone who is in very close proximity to a Hezzbollah operative is hardly “indiscriminate”.
It’s terrible when innocents are killed. That’s what happens in a war. This is a war. I cannot think of more elegant and targeted way to kill an enemy that embeds itself in a civilian population. Can you?
But but but its GOOD AND BASED to do this if you aren't a fat blue haired they/them, haven't you heard! It's only cringe when people who we hold in disdain do it!
What about all the missiles the people he loves are firing from southern Lebanon into Israel? It's not wrong to be happy that the terroist group behind thsese missile attacks was weakened.
Not really. Defensive actions may be unpleasant, but not "bad" by any objective reasoning. And if you've never made a peep about the missile bombardment from Southern Lebanon into Israel, frankly I question your motivation.
By all Gharbi's logic, *all* of Israeli attacks present a major national security issue. Sure, Israel is blowing up Hezbollah munitions depots today, but how would you feel if they blew up US depots, huh?
You think that's not an issue? Maybe you don't care about "those people."
I really hope you guys are thinking about the strange audience capture thing you have going on and the larger problem that your audience just kinda sucks at thinking critically. On the other hand, you could also just start criticizing the left way more and easily double your income. Can't say I'd blame you tbh, the incentives here are really fucked up!
Huh? Audience capture how? This episode would be the exact opposite of that.
I think you have a problem with people not wanting to listen to certain people and therefore they suck at thinking critically. Whereas in fact people evaluated the person's value for themselves and decided that this person isn't someone worth their time. Perhaps you need to engage with a little more critical thinking yourself before accusing a whole swath of listeners of some nefarious wrong think.
It’s almost like this is a podcast for people who are willing to listen to the ideas of and have conversations with people they don’t entirely agree with 🧐 Are we, or are we not, “perverts for nuance?”
It’s perfectly fine to judge people’s reasoning based on their takes on major issues. Humans do that every single day. You can see nuance *and* think someone’s talking a load of crap.
Everything else the dude said was pretty bog standard for the "heterodox" (a term I can't fucking stand) community. Might as well focus on the one aspect of him that is kind of interesting.
It can simultaneously be true that al-Gharbi's takes on the Middle Eastern conflicts are misguided or worse, and that he has something useful to offer on the class politics of 21st century America.
Hell, Chomsky's writing on both post-modernism's failures and the limits of large language models still stand strong, even though his foreign policy takes are even worse.
This exactly. I absolutely don’t agree with a lot of what he claims but I appreciated the thoughtful discussion and there were a few lightbulb moments in the ep too.
I feel like Katie would have made it much more interesting and pushed back to try to find something interesting buried in there instead of being so impressed how much the host agreed with him.
My thanks to Barpod commentators for saving me an hour. I did start having my doubts ~07:15 when al-Gharbi whined about losing adjunct job despite glowing teaching evals. Dude, you just told us you’re either an easy grader, you don’t have an assigned textbook, attendance is optional or all three.
I wonder whether he is on the spectrum. His communication style was odd. He's mastered academic English without learning how to tone it down for a general audience, so he comes across like a Poindexter. Also, while speaking he frequently cracked himself up when he wasn't saying anything that was particularly funny. Maybe it was nerves.
I would not have enjoyed listening to his lectures.
Yeah honestly at my Uni the better the teaching evals the worse the course. Though the bad professors also often got bad evals if they were saying things students didn't like.
But the real good professors rarely got good evals, because they had standards.
Rather like Mark Twain’s opinion of his father’s intelligence, one can take a decade to appreciate a good professor. The surprising thing is that Al-Gharbi doesn’t recognise this.
My problem with Rob is he was basically like “I met a dumb hypocritical girl in college and now I think everyone with a college degree (except myself) is a vapid hypocrite.” This interviewer is not better.
I just find it hard to swallow given how many of my students actually do come from working class backgrounds, are the first in their family to go to college, and will go on to have the kinds of professions that Rob and Moussa would say classify them as out of touch hypocritical elites (doctors, educators, etc).
That’s it! The first time I saw the phrase I thought: Here we go. Someone met some super annoying people at a fancy college and now they’re gonna monetize their Substack by yapping about it forever.
I think yes, those kids or their kids do become out of touch hypocritical elites. It's a circle of life. Not sure if i remember correctly, but that is something Steven Pinker described in his interview with MM recently. Could have been someone else's interview to somebody else though lol
Interesting, I actually really liked the idea of luxury beliefs at first, but over time I’ve found it less and less compelling for reasons I haven’t figured out yet, so I’m curious, why do you prefer it?
i said i like Rob better, he seems to be a man of conviction. I don't suppose he would be rewriting his articles every time he tries to appeal to a different audience. Just guessing of course.
i find his ideas compelling because this is what i am seeing too. Please let me know if figure it out, i'd love to know what your reasons are
Ah ok, I think one of us may have misheard then because I thought Musa specifically said he *did not* rewrite his articles when submitting to conservative outlets.
Re luxury beliefs, I think my issue is that I don’t think it’s unique to the elites, people are just generally more likely to be wrong about things they have less experience with, it’s just unfortunate that elites have more control over city governments for example, but that’s a separate issue, and also it’s easy to find examples where the working class is more likely to support something that would be much worse for them, like Trump’s tariffs. TBH there may still be value in Rob’s initial formulation, maybe I’ve just become annoyed at how it’s caught on and I can’t escape the term now, sort of like how a lot of psychology concepts get expanded and run into the ground. I kinda get the sense that Rob himself thinks it’s gotten a bit out of hand.
I think there's also a flip side to the luxury beliefs thing. It might be described as "missing the forest for the trees". Most policy decisions have upsides and downsides, and the closer you are to the downsides, the less likely the upsides will seem worth it to you.
I think the concept of luxury belief is narrowly useful when describing an extreme position that signals social cachet but doesn't withstand contact with reality (e.g. police abolition). But it's too often used erroneously for more nuanced positions on issues like immigration or drug policy.
Part of my issue is that I imagine I could find something where the poor non college educated are equally wrong about something like academia but talking about “poverty beliefs” would be classist, rude, and unhelpful. But then I’ve never known a police abolitionist IRL so maybe there’s something about these extreme positions or Rob’s experiences at Yale that I just don’t get.
A common "poverty belief" is the idea that "tax write-offs" on losses are some devious trick. There are some odd and bad policy loopholes out there, but the vast majority of "write-offs" are totally sane good tax policy.
If I get taxed 15% on profit my business makes, and this year I made a profit of $1M on general operations, but we also as an aside had a special project where we imported a bunch of fancy foreign products for $2M, and then could only sell them for a $1M.
Well it makes perfect sense that my profit would be $0 and my tax liability $0. Yet people who have never run a business always see it as some bizarre devious thing.
Like I will sponsor a kids tournament and people will be like "oh you just write that off anyway". Which they think means it was somehow free to me, but in reality means that the $2,000 I gave to put on the event reduced my taxes by like $100, and so only "cost" me $1,900 because my taxes will be $100 lower at the end of the year.
Worried my point about “poverty beliefs” might not have been communicated right so just to add, basically I think this is a universal human tendency, but the heterodox sphere is only calling it out when one specific group does it because a person coined a pithy phrase that only applies to that group, and trying to point out this asymmetry is difficult.
Right, people who have no experience with poverty also known as rich -er people tend to get things wrong about poor people experience. People who live in safe towns who are also rich -er want to defund the police. It's just let them eat cake kind of thing.
I don't see this term being used a lot, so I am not as annoyed yet
I don't think either of you misunderstood-- at one point he implied that he was not rewriting the articles, at another he implied that he was, but that he was reframing the same concepts in different terms. It was very confusing and seemed self-serving to me.
Musa was pretty clear that he rewrote the articles depending on the audience. That seemed to be the whole point for him. It strengthened his rhetorical bag.
Ah whoops, that’s what I get for listening to a podcast while doing other activities. Still don’t see how that makes him a man of low conviction like Anna implied but then I’m inclined to like him.
It’s a really dismissive framing. I hear the phrase used by people to just dismiss out of hand any political views they don’t agree with. It’s easy to say “only rich people believe that so I don’t have to actually argue against it based on merit”.
It is extremely funny to see people re-create stand point epistemology, although to be fair I suspect most people are using the phrase in a way that wasn’t intended.
No doubt. Twenty seconds into listening to him, I was struggling w a visceral dislike. And that’s a liberal time estimate. I’ll try a time or two more to get through it, but… man. Not a fan.
He seems like a nice guy and I am sorry he got canceled but his thesis is all old news. The Jacobin / Democratic Socialist scene have been drawing a connections between the upper midldle class and identity polictics as a distraction for a while. Just google some of the old Jacobin youtube videos from years ago.
Yes..I don't think it's new to Jacobin either but Jacobin is a good contemporary illustration of where the received notion of the left and identity politics diverge.
(Deleted my previous comment since it was way too snarky and combative, sorry if you saw that). Leftists have some good critiques of identity politics, although in my experience DSA types are all in on identity, but I thought Musa made some good arguments why the leftist explanation doesn’t really work. In particular I think he’s right that Occupy Wall Street did a neat trick of redirecting anger towards a small segment of the ultra elite, and leftist critiques of wokeness tend to fall into that same trap of blaming the ultra wealthy for using identity to divide workers.
Additionally it seems like the entire genre of "the elite adopt ideas that harm people but don't suffer the consequences" discourse can be avoided by simply listening to Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys, it's all already there.
I do think there's a difference between "politically queer" heterosexuals and people who actually engage in same-sex relationships before settling down with the opposite sex. There are a number of practical reasons why that tends to happen -- there's less risk of being judged by family, it's easier to start a family of your own, plus the dating pool is larger to begin with. It doesn't mean they were never bisexual to begin with.
Although, I do find it cringe when people in long-term monogamous hetero relationships make a big deal about being bisexual or act like it makes their hetero relationships "more queer". That seems like a straightforward consequence of progressives treating "heterosexual" as a synonym for "evil oppressor" and "queer" as a synonym for "virtuous and special".
Same. I slept with two very beautiful girls in my twenties and when people say that "all women are a bit bisexual" I know that that's bullshit because it was exactly that experimentation that proved to me I only like men.
No, the default is hetero. You don't need to prove you're hetero. You shouldn't need to prove you're gay either, but when you get privilege for identifying as one, you gotta show why it's not stolen valor.
I was disappointed in this episode, but not for the same reasons as most others folks writing on here. I was admittedly skeptical of this episode based on the framing of the "liberal elites unraveling" institutions or whatever. I have yet to hear an elite vs non-elite discourse that doesn't fall into overgeneralizations and attempts shoe horn in political and personal grievance to explain an overly broad world view. I would say this conversation wasn't any different than the many others covering this topic, although I did like this guy better than Rob Henderson, who I think gunning for a position of the next culture warrior public "intellectual".
I can understand the sentiment that drive this world view of elites vs non elites and I don't think those terms are entirely un useful, but I think people tend to lean way to heavily on those categorization to help craft a simplistic world view that is of limited utility. Because of this, I think it often morphs into a fairly problematic world view due this simplistic binary framing of "us vs them", that is mostly useful for stoking people's grievances towards an out group. This is largely the issue with populist politics.
There are elements of what Musa says that ring true to me, but I think when actually dig into those claims he touches they are pretty banal. Is it surprising that managerial types and academics tend to come from higher up the income ladder? Is it surprising that there can be disconnect from people managing an organization and what actually happening on the ground at an organization? Is it surprising that academics social theories tend to fall woefully short what is actually happening in the real world? And none of this is unique to "liberal" circles.
Don't get me wrong, I think these questions can be interesting jumping off point for exploring social structures. For instance I am very open to the idea that our society has shifted towards favoring more managerial types positions, but in the process it has created a large gap between workers and managers of these organizations, with too many top heavy organizations. Just a thought.
Unfortunately, Musa moves towards the elite vs non elite framing that favors that nebulous world view that I think just fails to actually explain much of anything. That framing just favors being able to graft on a lot of personal sentiments and grievances to a world view that doesn't offer much anything practical except creating an in group out group sentiment. It relies on trying paint the elites and non elites as sharing dichotomous world views based on their allotment in life and it is pretty much always bull shit. Go to any given construction site or an office space and I guarantee you will find a range opinions on most political topics. This is another populism sucks as a political philosophy. You just can't divide the world neatly into two opposing camps, as much as people really want to for the convenience of explaining their world view.
I think if you're going try make such broad generalized you should be a lot more cautious on how much reliance you put on those claims. I think Musa is far to reliant on this overly broad world view and as a result I think his thesis comes across pretty weak. I will add this is all based on this interview and it possible that his actual book is much substantive and interesting. However, I do remain skeptical based on this interview and seeing how others have explored this topic.
I agree with this take, for the most part. One issue I saw is that what he’s calling “symbolic capitalists” or “elites” includes way too many people. For example he includes “education” which is one of the largest professions and includes people from every city, town and village in the country and from every political stripe. Yes of course teachers unions can be crap and pass a lot of these dumb ideas around but teachers themselves are not all members of some elite.
I do see a lot of people from my milieu who are very blind to plight of the working classes. Feeling very entitled to 6 figure incomes for a job where they sit at home in front of an computer and maybe do 2-3 hours of real work throughout the day. Or complaining that a $60k salary is unthinkably low and no one can live on that - despite that being well above the median income for a single earner.
What I don’t see is these folks all wanting to be social climbers and to become more elite. Moreso they want to maintain the high standard of living they are used to. So there are some tendencies towards NIMBY ism and like was mentioned favoring lockdowns during COVID. Though that I think varied substantially - I was furious when our local school reduced the number of in person days at the last minute after a few assholes who weren’t sending their kids anyway protested. Despite being exactly the symbolic capitalist type described.
Buddy, you put words to a lot of my feelings about this episode. I found myself really struggling while listening, because it all felt so simplistic and even basic points were incorrect (income inequality has actually decreased recently for instance). My skepticism was really set off quickly with this one.
I pretty much agree word for word with your thoughtful and even-handed analysis. I, too, found myself thinking that this didn’t seem particularly revelatory.
However, like you, I also think that how it came across is an artifact of this being a bird’s-eye-view interview, which inherently is going to be a bit basic. Thanks for your post.
I get the impression that is how more people are starting to view the "elitist" discourse. It is tired explanation that falls short of explaining much of anything
Well, to be generous, I think that some occasions of discourse do offer explanations - though of course how successful the explanations will be will vary (wildly) by occasion. What I think is the main issue is the failure to actually connect and make the explanations palpable or actionable. Like it or not, it is a reasonable duty for those that choose to do the heavy lifting of intellectual work (however loosely defined) to actually try to address their audience in terms they can relate to in order to make meaningful change. (And no, this is not the same as "dumbing down.") This, in my view, is where they often -- but not always - fail to deliver; it's unclear who their actually talking to.
Well we see this bit differently if I understand you correctly. It sounds like you more or less agree with his underlying premise of symbolic capitalist taking over elite institutions and causing them to unravel with their out of touch ideas, or something like that. But it sounds like you mostly reject his overly academic language and don't see it as useful in getting non elites to engage with the topic. Sorry if I am putting words I your mouth, this is just how this read to me.
I mostly reject his underlying premise because I think the elite vs non elite framework that he inevitably slips into is just overly generalized and turns to sloppy thinking. Some of what he touched on could be interesting topics to explore, like that of great awokenings of history (although I don't like leans into culture war lingo). I could see how analyzing these culture moments in history that led public uprisings and cultural shift could be interesting, but I just don't think what he said on topic was very interesting. It came across as slightly dressed up culture war dribble.
Oh, I have no current opinion on his position - I don’t think I know enough about it yet. If it seemed like I was defending him in some way, I wasn’t. I probably wasn’t terribly clear in the message you’re responding to.
I think I was just making the point (maybe just to myself even) that when any topic crosses the line from just plain old conversation to “discourse” (in the negative sense) it doesn’t necessarily turn me off to whatever message might be valuable. It’s just that when things get framed as “DISCOURSE” I tend to lose interest because I feel like the speaker is more interested in speaking to a select audience rather than to actually affect real change. But that’s a fairly negative stance, I admit.
Thanks for writing a really good critique of Musa's argument. I had some similar feelings listening to it, but I have ended up defending him in this comment section because so many of the critical comments seemed incredibly unfair!
I think these sorts of "there are two types of people" frameworks can be useful to help explain specific things to a limited degree, but its very easy to start using them to explain everything. My mum periodically latches on to one of these theories and then applies them way too broadly. First it was 'wolves vs. rabbits' then it was 'antifragility' then the 'uniparty' etc.
I agree, I found most the critical comments to be unfair or silly. A lot of them seem to be premised on him being one of those touch elites he is criticizing. Which it seems like a lot of that sentiment stems from him being coded as left wing based on his opinions about Israel. It comes across very reactionary.
That sort of false binary thinking is so easy to fall into. My mother actually does that all time too haha. I don't mind much in tge light hearted, tongue-in-cheek conversations, but when it takes on the pseudo academic presentation i find it rather troublesome.
Haven't finished the episode yet but I think this is another classic case of Barpod's audience getting cut right down the middle lol. I have enjoyed the episode and I think Musa's framing is interesting.
The stupid thing about social justice progressivism (SJP, as Trace describes it) or “wokeness” (in the colloquial sense) is that it disregards what made the left so successful in the past - many vs few. In a democracy it’s way easier to impose concentrated costs for diffuse gains (think progressive taxation from few wealthy people to redistribute to many less wealthy). SJP inverts it - now it’s diffuse costs for concentrated gas (the majority is expected to accede to the demands of ever smaller groups who reap the benefits). Put simply, this is rent seeking - think of the sugar industry which lobbied Congress to impose a quota to protect their business from foreign competition, so now sugar is more expensive and HFCS is used (yuck!). The progression of serf emancipation, slavery abolition, universal suffrage and the civil rights movement means that the vast majority of a) numerous groups and b) sympathetic groups had their concerns handled - so now you’re left with ever less sympathetic groups thinking they should make any demands upon the majority. Of course, the lunatics who believe in SJP think that the majority making any demands (or, god forbid, enforcing them) is “fascism” or “genocide” - both terms they have cheapened.
This is an interesting point. I'm remembering an episode of Coleman Hughes's podcast where he interviewed Keyu Jin who contrasted the US vs China. She noted that US policy will often focus on minority interests, while Chinese policy will tend to focus on the average citizen. That thinking helps to facilitate rapid development, and the Chinese government is then perceived (rightly or wrongly) as more accountable to the average citizen despite its issues. It's admittedly been a while since I listened to it.
I think there is a tendency in the US to prioritize the worst off person, which reflects the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" type of thinking underlying a lot of modern American liberal policy. This has its merits, but things can go awry once people knowingly strive to paint themselves as the most deserving victims.
FYI China has very forceful and formal diversity/Affirmative Action requirements for ethnic minorities. This is a product of wanting to preserve a multi ethnic empire centered around one dominant ethnic group (Han), but it is still far beyond the dreams of the American SJPs.
I'm aware China has affirmative action, but I think she was referring more broadly to interest groups that represent a minority of the population, not necessarily ethnic minorities or even "identity groups". It was more a discussion of what Americans might be missing when it comes to the Chinese perception of the Chinese government. It's been a while since I listened, but the full interview is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ncP_HSpHo
But also, like you allude to, the goal of affirmative action can sometimes be more akin to assimilation than "elevating minority voices" in the modern SJP sense. I don't know enough to say exactly how China's policy goals fit in there (purported or actual).
I’m sorry, I couldn’t make it all the way through. I’m sure you both mean well, but this whole episode was just ‘elite’-splaining to the nth degree.
Any point made here through this scholarly research has long since been made by the actual people living it in much clearer ways.
The hypocrisy of the managerial class is news to absolutely no one, and listening to self-described members of that class discuss it like they discovered it, and as if their unique discoveries might now allow it to be solved, is just too much for me. Especially when it’s following the ‘working class people of Ohio are dumb enough to think their cats are being eaten’ episode.
I started listening to Barpod in 2021 to understand what the hell had happened to the media and online social discourse. It’s been great for that and I will continue to subscribe. But the tone-deaf episodes, at least to my ear, are becoming a little more frequent in number.
Being born into the upper-middle-class does not actually make you smarter or more knowledgeable than other people, and that unfortunately feels like a reminder that is needed here.
I feel like you've invented subtext that isn't really there. Musa doesn't claim to have invented any of these concepts. The title of the book and the key ideas are all derived from earlier works. What he has written is his attempt to frame everything in a coherent way and according to his particular focus and interest.
"Being born into the upper-middle-class does not actually make you smarter or more knowledgeable than other people, and that unfortunately feels like a reminder that is needed here."
That seems like an extremely ungenerous reading of what he talked about, that maybe says more about you and your particular hang-ups than Musa.
“Being born into” is the operative phrase here and the thing about episodes like this and related content is that I don’t necessarily interpret them as people disavowing their birthrights. Musa came from a military family and grew into the upper middle class; personally I find this an even MORE credible background for critiquing self styled “elites”, since the mores and nostrums of that class that everyone is steeped in and just accepts at face value still sound odd to an outsider.
On the other hand, it is kind of amusing to see an argument for the primacy of 'lived experience' on this substack of all substacks!
I just don’t think his framing is somehow coherent. I’m still struggling to understand why Musa has invented the phrase for the managerial class—one I can’t even remember at the moment because it’s so obscuring—that he did. I found this particular episode to be really navel-gazing and strange.
He didn't invent the term, IIRC.
Okay, then that’s probably wrong. His *use* of it is not clarifying, then. I left this episode feeling unsympathetic to the argument. It may just be personal experience. I straddle the lines being talked about in this episode. I grew up poor and a farm kid. But I also got a college education and then advanced into the ranks of the DC administrative career class. And then I bombed out of that for reasons I won’t discuss here and now I’m a working class guy again driving for UPS. This conversation just felt…navel-gazing and almost like two guys feeling guilty about their current place in life and publicly airing their feelings of internal guilt. A little like the people who voluntarily go to Robin D’Angelo “trainings.”
It was already framed in a coherent way though?
"... in a coherent way and according to his particular focus and interest."
What is his unique particular focus and interest that isn’t already covered?
What? I haven't read the book so obviously I can't give you a list of its every distinguishing feature, nor do I have the time to write you a literature review of existing works on the topic.
Do you apply this same bizarre standard of originality for every writer or just this guy? My suspicion is that you have latched on to 'unoriginality' as a line of attack because you decided you didn't like Musa for other reasons.
Be open about those reasons and engage on the substance of your disagreement, or quit hassling me.
I’m not the person you originally replied to, was just curious on what specific basis you thought they were wrong about “everything they said having long since been made by the actual people living it in much clearer ways.” No problem if you aren’t sure.
It's fine to rehash some concepts that were refrained and provided more clarity. That's how I view Rob Henderson. This is in that vein but I don't see what this author added beyond his own journey from uncrticial leftist to someone more thoughtful, which in itself is nice to hear.
Amen and Hallelujah! We get it already, woke libs are a scourge and a cancer and are ruining everything on the face of the earth. These media people and academics just can’t stop with the elite infighting.
The outrage about this episode is so unbelievably unwarranted. I'm going to bring this up any time someone here smugly proclaims how much better we are than the FP commenters. Did we even listen to the same thing?
Anyway besides that, as a member of the professional managerial class, I want to challenge their argument a bit. I do agree we're part of the problem, but the reason the reason millionaire and billionaires get the flack they do is because they give the instructions we have to follow. I see this constantly where I work where our wealthy clients want the cheapest product which usually translates to the most unethical product. What do you want us to do in that situation? Yes we are carrying out their orders but this is why we're complaining about them (covertly) in the hopes they will change.
That said are we a problem even without them? Yes but that's true of every class. Look at the working class people who oppose housing in their neighborhood because they think it will lead to gentrification. Why do we get shit on for not wanting housing but they get a pass? We're also not the only ones buying stuff off Amazon.
And segregation in NYC, I want to ask a question. When I grew up I went to a diverse school. But blacks hung out with blacks, hispanics with hispanics and whites with whites. Me the sole Indian/Asian was basically alone. Is it not possible that these patterns I observed could explain segregation on a city level? Maybe the (predominantly white) professional managerial class isn't to be blamed when the working class themselves self-segregate from each other. And moreover did anyone bother to ask them if they are upset with segregation? Is this just another case of elites projecting their values onto other groups?
"Diversity" as an unquestionable virtue, is 100% managerial class bullshit. People who've never actually had to live in an actually diverse neighborhood, raving about how everyone should want to.
I grew up in an area where my twenty-odd kid class in elementary school had probably ten different nationalities represented, including a Soviet/Russian kid at the time when that was a big deal, plus black kids bused in from poor areas across the city. In my twenties, I did a degree where I was probably the only person who could be called a "white guy" in the room. I think these sorts of experiences are an unalloyed good, and many Americans could use more of that.
It's not the same thing as shoving 20,000 migrants into a small town or sitting through a nonsense HR training or having to write a pledge of allegiance to Robin Deangelo in order to get a job as a physics professor. I think it's sad that those sorts of things have come to be associated with the word "diversity".
Yeah, agree. I grew up in military housing - but not officer's housing - and the way that working class kids of all the ethnicities got along and hung out with each other was pretty formative to my pro-diversity outlook.
Sadly it did not prepare me well for going to high school, where there were literal race wars.
Are we really still spreading the "20,000 migrants into a small town" blood libel here? Come on.
Wait. I thought it was 12-20k over the last few years?
And how is a population statistic like that a blood libel?
You thought incorrectly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ohio/comments/1fi5hrh/fact_check_no_there_are_not_20000_haitian/
There are perhaps that many total immigrants of all nationalities in the entire county. The number of Haitians is maybe 2000 at an upper bound. It's an order of magnitude off.
Hmm
How many Haitians are living in Springfield?
There’s no official tally. Mayor Rob Rue told CNN the city’s population has grown about 25% over the past three years, in part due to the arrival of Haitian immigrants.
Between 12,000 and 15,000 immigrants are living in Clark County, which includes Springfield, according to estimates on the city’s website. Of that group, an estimated 10,000-12,000 are Haitian, according to a July presentation from the county’s health commissioner, who cited data from school and social services officials.
-CNN
We had a Russian kid who's parents bought a farm after the fall of the Soviet Union. He really liked rap music and would sing it all the time.
Yeah it has its pluses and minuses like a lot of things. The reflexive "it only makes you stronger" is so galling, because it is obviously not true in a lot of situations.
Years ago worked at two different non-profits where everyone was a white lefty, lots of Jews with doctor/engineer husbands. At both places they felt the need to hire a token black employee, because it just seems so awkward having 12 white people at a left coded non-profit located in a big city.
And since they just do affirmative hiring and just grab anyone, the people are shit workers, don't work out at all, and then also call everyone racist and take 9 extra months before anyone has the courage to fire them because no one wants to validate being "the racist". It is diversity that very noticeably made the organizations less effective and a less pleasant place to work. And the fucking people hired apparently didn't like it either (though why you would so hate a job where you sat around all day doing nothing and rarely got called on it, I have no idea).
Yeah I thought the lines pushing the blame towards the middle class vs the upper were the weakest part of the show. The amount of power a billionaire wields is crazy. One of the few useful messages from the Occupy era was how the gap between the 1% and everyone else has grown massively since the 80s.
Sure, we are carrying water for forces we hate but that’s how we get a nice house, and don’t you know we complain covertly about it?
The "Amazon worker cages" seems like it would only fool people who never worked around heavy equipment. There are many times you are in a "cage" in an industrial setting and it's to keep you safe, not to trap you or whatever nefarious reason this guy suspects.
Edit: I talked to Musa on TwitterX and he basically said the issue was the high productivity requirements at Amazon. The cages are just symbolic. So in my eyes, this is an example of out of touch elites claiming to care about worker safety, while actually actively making them less safe.
Edit 2. He addressed this on TwitterX...but this makes him look like more of an asshole.
"I do wish I'd spent more time unpacking the example about worker cages, because a nontrivial share of commentators are like, "cages are for safety, don't you know anything about manual work" (I most certainly do! I worked for a little while unpacking freight when stores would get shipments). Not only is this something I understand, it's something that was not lost on any of the original reporting on the cages, even from journalists who never did manual jobs. Not one of the major players in this story failed to understand Amazon's justification that the cages were ostensibly for worker safety.
The point is, Amazon has a major safety problem (far outpacing all peers/ competitors), caused by their orwellian surveillance and discipline regime, and their extreme productivity demands. And their solution, rather than addressing those issues, is to cage up their workers more, to marginally reduce worker comp incidents without changing any of the underlying issues that drive their extreme injury rates and turnover."
I was assuming that folks were loosely familiar with this story, and could follow the point along, which is why I didn't unpack it. My bad. I unpack it here"
This guy sucks.
https://x.com/Musa_alGharbi/status/1838229758234022022?t=a0vHPKInlWnM3J83tbcePA&s=19
I'm not buying it. I've worked in a warehouse environment with cages and it was for security, I suppose in a broad sense it was for my safety (being safe from being accused of stealing) but it was a fucking nightmare to go to the toilet. I think this was by design but at the very least they didn't give a fuck.
Husband works in a factory environment and always has. He works with very dangerous machinery, he informed me he has never worked in a cage but rather the machines are partially caged.
Anything that would go over people's head usually had some type of cage to to prevent dropping stuff on people's heads. This particular cage was meant to go into robot only areas for repairs. The design is specifically safety based.
Yeah generally elites and leftists talking anything related to actual manufacturing is a joke.
I work in a manufacturing job driving a forklift. People their care about safety a lot.
Having come from a blue collar and lower socioeconomic class that now often finds himself in generationally well off circles….
you don’t know the 1/2 of it. (Or maybe you do)
Yeah I grew up poor in a rust belt town with friend's parents who had worked in closed steel mills & tool and die shops. So I know a bit, and now see it from the other side of the PMC.
Musa is picturing a cage where the worker can be prodded with pointy sticks and mocked.
I agree that leftist elites talking about actual manufacturing is a joke. I also want to include right wing elites too. The desire to bring manufacturing back to the US, is a right wing trope, but not one of those elites would want to do that type of work. Elites live in elite world where life is beautiful all the time.
Is this about the Amazon worker cage patent? If so then some readers here have low knowledge of current robotics.
The possible reach around a robot is called the workspace, which is usually a spheroid volume for an arm. It’s an extremely dangerous space for a human to be nearby. Imagine a robotic hook catching a sleeve or worse. A car manufacturing line has a huge red tape zone with a healthy margin to stop people from getting close to robots performing a set script.
For Amazon the case is very different because robots are picking different items from different locations. Throw in an extremely fast picking rate and it can be deadly.
Don’t worry. Thanks to the knee jerk backlash there will be expedited robotics research to reduce human workers.
Yes. I haven’t believed anything the media reports about Amazon for years. One of the frontlines in the battle between ideology and actual competence.
>(I most certainly do! I worked for a little while unpacking freight when stores would get shipments).
Oh wow real salt of the earth, right here. At least Jesse is honest when he says his only experience with non-media work was delivering pizzas for a week in undergrad.
Real Steve Buscemi "hello fellow kids" energy
Relevant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xYcyI2Cbls
Definitely not an episode I would share with a friend in order to promote the podcast. Perhaps one of the worst episodes ever.
These book tour promo episodes really are lame.
If there were a definitive ranking of BARPod episodes, the "Jesse interviews someone" have to cluster at the bottom. It's just not the right format, and he's way too reluctant to ask challenging questions (unlike Katie).
Yes, sadly this was a Dave Weigel level snore-fest. As I said for that one, unless a guest is very interesting or funny in their own right, they should prepare a story about internet bullshit to discuss - that has worked very well in the past. >1 hr of 90:10 guest rambling : Jesse agreeing does not make a good episode.
By the way, I don't know anything about Al-Gharbi's views on Israel or anything else, nor do I care. It would be very unfortunate if the criticism of this episode was dismissed on these grounds. It was just boring.
This podcast seems to work best when there’s a lot of back-and-forth between the speakers, and in this episode, with all the long stretches of time where the guest was speaking, I ended up feeling like I was getting a lecture. I get that he’s a college professor so he’s used to doing that, but it doesn’t work for me when I think about the way Jesse and Katie usually interact.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I noticed a couple comments on the ep with Katie and Hadley Freeman saying they enjoyed the eps with Katie and guest more than Jesse and guest. I think it's that Katie tends to have guest hosts that she has a rapport with so there's more banter, whereas Jesse invites people he finds interesting and gives them space to make their pitch. Tl;dr - Jesse please just invite Helen Lewis next time Katie is away.
For what it's worth, this was a better episode than that one. At least in this case the factual inaccuracies were mostly in the underlying work and not the podcast itself!
I think for this type of guest, a good idea would be a "listener questions" segment. Of course, this would mean revealing the guests ahead of time. But it might make for some more dynamic discussion.
Or just include Katie to not just passively consume from and occasionally agree with whatever the guest is serving up.
Katie has perhaps had better rapport with her guests, but it veers into circle jerk territory at times with the focus on UK gender stuff. I like that Jesse interviews a broad range of people.
It least the Katie version of the circle jerks are funny. Jesse seems essentially optional, serving a kind of hype man role.
Yeah, this format doesn’t really allow for much humor, and BaRpod without the humor just doesn’t fly.
>He lost me by trying to argue that millionaires and billionaires (who have more money than they need) shouldn't be blamed for their objectionable decisions, because the people who carry out the decisions (who do need money to live) are somehow more culpable, or something?
I don't think that is what he is saying at all. He is saying that the Columbia educated HR manager for Pepsi who is all about "# resistance" and "ACAB", and "intersectionalpalooza", has some real actual culpability for the systems they claim to so hate.
It isn't JUST the fault of the millionaires and billionaires. Which is right.
"He lost me by trying to argue that millionaires and billionaires (who have more money than they need) shouldn't be blamed for their objectionable decisions"
He just didn't say that? He did say that sub-millionaires deserved blame. But blame isn't zero-sum. If you pay me to murder someone, my culpability doesn't somehow make you less blameworthy. (I'm speaking morally, not legally.)
I think I don’t need to listen to an interview with a guy whose Twitter feed is all crying for Hezbollah. I guess there’s one issue that the woke and unwoke agree upon.
A quick search definitely didn't find any "crying for Hezbollah." Musa is an exceptionally thoughtful guy from a military family who lost his twin brother to a war in the Middle East. I can't force you to listen to anything, of course, but I highly recommend at least checking out his work.
Before listening and I haven't listened I went to look at his feed to learn a bit more about him. He retweeted this garbage:
https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1837025861708447779
Not sure what you call but I, personally don't know if I can take a guy like that seriously. Sorry Jesse.
Best response from that thread: "The US perpetrated 100% of the cross-border attacks with Germany in 1944. The Nazis have shown remarkable restraint."
The pedant in me is obliged to note that this is actually false-- the Nazis launched two big cross-border offensives into France and the Low Countries in late 1944 (the well-known Battle of the Bulge and the almost completely obscure Operation Nordwind).
I'm sure Darryl Cooper could explain that these were merely self-defense, however.
Respect for your knowledge of Nordwind. I'm a board wargamer, so that was something I was aware of
By coincidence, I actually learned the other day that there was a kind of Phase Two to Nordwind (Operation Winter Solstice), in which the Germans actually forced a Rhine crossing and established a bridgehead on the French side-- but unfortunately it took place in January 1945, so technically outside the temporal boundary of the joke tweet above. It achieved some initial success, but was almost immediately canceled after the Soviets launched the Vistula-Oder offensive.
Wow, that’s amazing in its awfulness.
Do you have some evidence to refute this data or just ad hominem snark?
Where was the ad hominem? The fact that I can't take someone who retweets garbage seriously?
So you chose to take that at face value without bothering to check at all and come at me?
This data is from a database that counts an attack as one episode regardless if it's 50 rockets lobbed at Israel indiscriminately or one precision mission drone by Israel. So a 50 rockets lobby that can hit 50 houses (or in a case a soccer field with teens playing that killed 12 Druze children) counts as ONE attack as well as one targeted strike against a Hezbollah munition depot.
I'm trying to be civil but your accusatory tone is really gross and I'm not sure I'm gonna be civil next time you respond because I don't have the patience for this nonsense anymore.
Jesus
"from a military family who lost his twin brother to a war in the Middle East"
A tragedy in someone's family shouldn't make their ideas immune to critique.
I lost count of the number of times "as a <insert identity marker here>" was wheeled out in the first 25 mins of that interview. At which point I switched off and went back to reading the dozens of articles that have been published in places like the Jacobin, which say the same things but without using the relentless use of one magical identity shield or another
I didn’t mind the interview, but I definitely did find myself noting that this is stuff non-idpol leftist have been pointing out for almost a decade.
“ I lost count of the number of times "as a <insert identity marker here>" was wheeled out in the first 25 mins of that interview.”
I believe the count was zero- I don’t remember him doing that even one time during the interview.
This seems like an empirical claim that can easily be verified.6
Neither do I, but hey, who needs facts when you have outrage!:
“as a black muslim” I too believe in facts
“as a black muslim” I believe you need to get your hearing check
Listen, my best friend is black. (cracks knuckles)
I have the same reaction when an interviewee drops the name of their elite university when it has no relevance to the topic under discussion.
Hi, Jesse, I looked again and the tweets I saw are alas there. But thank you for your respectful reply. I’m a fan.
He’s not a crazy Islamist professor, he just believes that ISIS has been better for people in the Middle East than the US.
I mean I don't think anyone can claim that the US is batting a thousand with their nation-building endeavors in the Mideast.
No shit, but therefore ISIS is better for the Middle East? And thats obvious on its face?
Okay but is that actually what he said? Because that doesn't seem likely.
You’re welcome to try listening to the podcast before commenting
Well, the US stands heads and shoulders above ISIS when it comes to cultural resource management.
Forget it man, there’s a large chunk of your audience who unfortunately will never listen to anyone from outside their pro-Israel echo chamber. The irony is palpable.
I can't take someone seriously when they retweet unscientific unverified terrorist propaganda. Call me biased if you like. And what is the irony?
if there even is pro-Israel echo chamber online, it's really really tiny, that's why this triggers (well, me)
https://x.com/Musa_alGharbi/status/1836519862635790410?t=7rHyIPEib8nxVFmhF2loQg&s=19
"Americans celebrating the pager/ walkie talky bombings in Lebanon, that injured many civilians and killed a little girl among others -- even if you're the type of person who simply doesn't care about "those people" (and if you are, don't tell me) -- they should recognize this is a major national security issue."
Just for the record, this is not "crying for Hezbollah."
All available evidence points to it being one of the most precise mass strikes on a militia totally embedded in a civilian population.
And a sabotage of a military supply chain has a long history in warfare, though rarely this precise. This isn't some new 'major national security issue' - militaries around the world have incredibly strict vetting around suppliers for this very reason.
Given the obvious lack of critical thought that went into that post its a fair assumption to make that it was driven by an emotional reaction to how successful the operation was at damaging Hezbollah
This was almost the perfect operation. It killed or injured a ton of terrorists with minimal damage to civilians. If this doesn't meet the standards for proportionality than nothing will.
Which, of course, is the point. Israel is supposed to just sit back and take whatever Hezbollah does because.... reasons.
And I don't see how this is a US national security issue. Do we think Israel will be attempting to blow US soldiers?
> Israel is supposed to just sit back and take whatever Hezbollah does because.... reasons.
It's crazy that Jesse bends over backwards to try to be "nuanced" in such a blantely obvious situation.
The Islamic world, with 30% of the world's popuation, who have colonized 50 countries, put forth an upside-down notion that Jews, at 0.2% of the world's population are whiter-than-white people who have colonized "Palestine" to which they have no historic claim because they're really "European".
Even though polls show a solid majority of Americans support the right of Israel to exist, college campuses and elite bubbles like the one Jesse lives in, like to show that white is black and up is down and pretend that this upside-down world is plainly true.
Jesse won't call bullshit to their claims because he likes to be able to go to Princeton alumini events and mingle with their intellectuals. As Katie said several times "the only reason people go to fancy schools is so they can spend the rest of their lives telling people they went there." Being shunned from Princeton social circles would destroy Jesse's core identity.
Before condemning the lack of critical thought, did you read the full tweet? It's not about sabotage in general. It's about the same supplier being used by the US military.
Here's the rest of the tweet:
"The same company that sabotaged devices in Lebanon on behalf of a foreign government also produces stuff for our own soldiers, which could likewise have been tampered with by that same foreign government or others, as @lhfang
and Jack Poulson report: https://www.leefang.com/p/company-behind-walkie-talkie-devices
And I suspect we won't be describing it as "cool" or "funny" when it's our own people getting blown up. As may well be the case in the near future."
So he is worried Israel (same foreign government) could sabotage US devices? Did i get it right?
“Jack Poulson”
Good grief
The pagers were manufactured by BAC Consulting in Hungary. This is a company created in 2022, and are categorically not a supplier to the US military.
The ease with which some of you run with easily debunked information really calls into the question your motivation for doing so…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cew12r5qe1ro
Lol thx for that "context". It's even more unhinged.
What about the numerous indiscriminate civilian casualties that accompanied this "precise mass strike"? I'd call that a major national security issue.
Let's talk about the over 8,000+ indiscriminate rockets that have been lobbed at Israel since Oct 7th, 2023. Do you want to talk about the indiscriminate killing of 12 Druze children by such rocket in northern Israel or nah?
Edit: finally got to a computer to edit this (when is edit coming to mobile apps?) since ZigZag so gently and calmly pointed out my hastily written comment was lying, of course implying ill-intent. Thanks ZigZag, never change!
Mossad could have put a lot more explosives in there if they wanted collateral damage. We have no idea how many people who were not Hezzbollah were harmed. We certainly can’t trust their numbers. Harming only someone who is in very close proximity to a Hezzbollah operative is hardly “indiscriminate”.
It’s terrible when innocents are killed. That’s what happens in a war. This is a war. I cannot think of more elegant and targeted way to kill an enemy that embeds itself in a civilian population. Can you?
Precise is the opposite of indiscriminate.
Zero is not an achievable number when an enemy force is embedded in a civilian population.
If you’re not an absolute pacifist, what ratio of casualties would you find acceptable?
I'm leaving out all of his retweets. But he does like to retweet people who support Hezbollah.
My main issue with the podcast: it was just boring book promotion.
YES so so very booring, Jesse is really terrible in this format
It's not crying for Hezbollah, it's just carrying water for them.
I hate that we have to analyze someone’s politics before we’ll listen to anything else they say - purity police are everywhere
But but but its GOOD AND BASED to do this if you aren't a fat blue haired they/them, haven't you heard! It's only cringe when people who we hold in disdain do it!
I thought it was a mostly good podcast, though I don't agree with his views on the IP conflict.
What about all the missiles the people he loves are firing from southern Lebanon into Israel? It's not wrong to be happy that the terroist group behind thsese missile attacks was weakened.
It’s possible to believe that both the things are bad!
Not really. Defensive actions may be unpleasant, but not "bad" by any objective reasoning. And if you've never made a peep about the missile bombardment from Southern Lebanon into Israel, frankly I question your motivation.
By all Gharbi's logic, *all* of Israeli attacks present a major national security issue. Sure, Israel is blowing up Hezbollah munitions depots today, but how would you feel if they blew up US depots, huh?
You think that's not an issue? Maybe you don't care about "those people."
I really hope you guys are thinking about the strange audience capture thing you have going on and the larger problem that your audience just kinda sucks at thinking critically. On the other hand, you could also just start criticizing the left way more and easily double your income. Can't say I'd blame you tbh, the incentives here are really fucked up!
Huh? Audience capture how? This episode would be the exact opposite of that.
I think you have a problem with people not wanting to listen to certain people and therefore they suck at thinking critically. Whereas in fact people evaluated the person's value for themselves and decided that this person isn't someone worth their time. Perhaps you need to engage with a little more critical thinking yourself before accusing a whole swath of listeners of some nefarious wrong think.
It’s almost like this is a podcast for people who are willing to listen to the ideas of and have conversations with people they don’t entirely agree with 🧐 Are we, or are we not, “perverts for nuance?”
There are perverts for nuance here and then there are perspective fetishists.
Other people have to be nuanced, we can take maximalist positions
It’s perfectly fine to judge people’s reasoning based on their takes on major issues. Humans do that every single day. You can see nuance *and* think someone’s talking a load of crap.
We are nuanced, therefore propagandists for terrorists organisations are equally valid as nuance is not really what I signed up for.
Everything else the dude said was pretty bog standard for the "heterodox" (a term I can't fucking stand) community. Might as well focus on the one aspect of him that is kind of interesting.
Thank you.
It can simultaneously be true that al-Gharbi's takes on the Middle Eastern conflicts are misguided or worse, and that he has something useful to offer on the class politics of 21st century America.
Hell, Chomsky's writing on both post-modernism's failures and the limits of large language models still stand strong, even though his foreign policy takes are even worse.
100% agree.
But the class politics stuff is boring and just standard issue you can find in tons of places
This exactly. I absolutely don’t agree with a lot of what he claims but I appreciated the thoughtful discussion and there were a few lightbulb moments in the ep too.
I don't know why Jesse feels obligated to to keep one foot in the water with the antisemetic, anti-American, and pro-terrorism Left.
Because "pervert for nuance" is a funny podcaster way of saying "incapable of holding strong beliefs about anything."
This is what happens when you take the pervert for nuance thing too far.
I just hate it when things like this sneak into my safe bubble. I am glad Katie wasn't there
I feel like Katie would have made it much more interesting and pushed back to try to find something interesting buried in there instead of being so impressed how much the host agreed with him.
My thanks to Barpod commentators for saving me an hour. I did start having my doubts ~07:15 when al-Gharbi whined about losing adjunct job despite glowing teaching evals. Dude, you just told us you’re either an easy grader, you don’t have an assigned textbook, attendance is optional or all three.
The best part of this podcast was unironically when he regaled us with a story of how he won an argument on the internet
He started the whole interview by bragging about “destroying” a right winger on the internet. Ego much?
I wonder whether he is on the spectrum. His communication style was odd. He's mastered academic English without learning how to tone it down for a general audience, so he comes across like a Poindexter. Also, while speaking he frequently cracked himself up when he wasn't saying anything that was particularly funny. Maybe it was nerves.
I would not have enjoyed listening to his lectures.
ooof. you werent kidding.
Lol. My thoughts exactly. Still, I tried to listen with an open mind until about 30 minutes in. This was simply a boring episode.
Yeah honestly at my Uni the better the teaching evals the worse the course. Though the bad professors also often got bad evals if they were saying things students didn't like.
But the real good professors rarely got good evals, because they had standards.
Rather like Mark Twain’s opinion of his father’s intelligence, one can take a decade to appreciate a good professor. The surprising thing is that Al-Gharbi doesn’t recognise this.
"I started writing more for right-leaning publications after I was cancelled by Fox"
This is a BARpod quote for the ages
These ideas are similar to Rob Henderson's on luxury beliefs. Personally I like Rob better
My problem with Rob is he was basically like “I met a dumb hypocritical girl in college and now I think everyone with a college degree (except myself) is a vapid hypocrite.” This interviewer is not better.
I just find it hard to swallow given how many of my students actually do come from working class backgrounds, are the first in their family to go to college, and will go on to have the kinds of professions that Rob and Moussa would say classify them as out of touch hypocritical elites (doctors, educators, etc).
That’s it! The first time I saw the phrase I thought: Here we go. Someone met some super annoying people at a fancy college and now they’re gonna monetize their Substack by yapping about it forever.
I think yes, those kids or their kids do become out of touch hypocritical elites. It's a circle of life. Not sure if i remember correctly, but that is something Steven Pinker described in his interview with MM recently. Could have been someone else's interview to somebody else though lol
Interesting, I actually really liked the idea of luxury beliefs at first, but over time I’ve found it less and less compelling for reasons I haven’t figured out yet, so I’m curious, why do you prefer it?
i said i like Rob better, he seems to be a man of conviction. I don't suppose he would be rewriting his articles every time he tries to appeal to a different audience. Just guessing of course.
i find his ideas compelling because this is what i am seeing too. Please let me know if figure it out, i'd love to know what your reasons are
Ah ok, I think one of us may have misheard then because I thought Musa specifically said he *did not* rewrite his articles when submitting to conservative outlets.
Re luxury beliefs, I think my issue is that I don’t think it’s unique to the elites, people are just generally more likely to be wrong about things they have less experience with, it’s just unfortunate that elites have more control over city governments for example, but that’s a separate issue, and also it’s easy to find examples where the working class is more likely to support something that would be much worse for them, like Trump’s tariffs. TBH there may still be value in Rob’s initial formulation, maybe I’ve just become annoyed at how it’s caught on and I can’t escape the term now, sort of like how a lot of psychology concepts get expanded and run into the ground. I kinda get the sense that Rob himself thinks it’s gotten a bit out of hand.
I think there's also a flip side to the luxury beliefs thing. It might be described as "missing the forest for the trees". Most policy decisions have upsides and downsides, and the closer you are to the downsides, the less likely the upsides will seem worth it to you.
I think the concept of luxury belief is narrowly useful when describing an extreme position that signals social cachet but doesn't withstand contact with reality (e.g. police abolition). But it's too often used erroneously for more nuanced positions on issues like immigration or drug policy.
Part of my issue is that I imagine I could find something where the poor non college educated are equally wrong about something like academia but talking about “poverty beliefs” would be classist, rude, and unhelpful. But then I’ve never known a police abolitionist IRL so maybe there’s something about these extreme positions or Rob’s experiences at Yale that I just don’t get.
A common "poverty belief" is the idea that "tax write-offs" on losses are some devious trick. There are some odd and bad policy loopholes out there, but the vast majority of "write-offs" are totally sane good tax policy.
If I get taxed 15% on profit my business makes, and this year I made a profit of $1M on general operations, but we also as an aside had a special project where we imported a bunch of fancy foreign products for $2M, and then could only sell them for a $1M.
Well it makes perfect sense that my profit would be $0 and my tax liability $0. Yet people who have never run a business always see it as some bizarre devious thing.
Like I will sponsor a kids tournament and people will be like "oh you just write that off anyway". Which they think means it was somehow free to me, but in reality means that the $2,000 I gave to put on the event reduced my taxes by like $100, and so only "cost" me $1,900 because my taxes will be $100 lower at the end of the year.
TLDR: https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ?si=VjFELMDJYvWrXAm8
Worried my point about “poverty beliefs” might not have been communicated right so just to add, basically I think this is a universal human tendency, but the heterodox sphere is only calling it out when one specific group does it because a person coined a pithy phrase that only applies to that group, and trying to point out this asymmetry is difficult.
yeah? Maybe i did misunderstand
Right, people who have no experience with poverty also known as rich -er people tend to get things wrong about poor people experience. People who live in safe towns who are also rich -er want to defund the police. It's just let them eat cake kind of thing.
I don't see this term being used a lot, so I am not as annoyed yet
I don't think either of you misunderstood-- at one point he implied that he was not rewriting the articles, at another he implied that he was, but that he was reframing the same concepts in different terms. It was very confusing and seemed self-serving to me.
You didn't misunderstand. Right before the 9 minute mark, he says he changed the way he framed his arguments.
Musa was pretty clear that he rewrote the articles depending on the audience. That seemed to be the whole point for him. It strengthened his rhetorical bag.
Ah whoops, that’s what I get for listening to a podcast while doing other activities. Still don’t see how that makes him a man of low conviction like Anna implied but then I’m inclined to like him.
It’s a really dismissive framing. I hear the phrase used by people to just dismiss out of hand any political views they don’t agree with. It’s easy to say “only rich people believe that so I don’t have to actually argue against it based on merit”.
It is extremely funny to see people re-create stand point epistemology, although to be fair I suspect most people are using the phrase in a way that wasn’t intended.
Jesse keeps picking really unlikable people to interview.
I just love how humble and self-effacing this guy is. You can tell a lot about a person when they refuse to sneer or laugh at their opponents.
Wait…
Not only that, he spent half the episode guffawing at his own jokes
No doubt. Twenty seconds into listening to him, I was struggling w a visceral dislike. And that’s a liberal time estimate. I’ll try a time or two more to get through it, but… man. Not a fan.
He seems like a nice guy and I am sorry he got canceled but his thesis is all old news. The Jacobin / Democratic Socialist scene have been drawing a connections between the upper midldle class and identity polictics as a distraction for a while. Just google some of the old Jacobin youtube videos from years ago.
This isn’t new to Jacobin. James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941.
Yes..I don't think it's new to Jacobin either but Jacobin is a good contemporary illustration of where the received notion of the left and identity politics diverge.
identity politics are right wing.
not disagreeing with what you said.
(Deleted my previous comment since it was way too snarky and combative, sorry if you saw that). Leftists have some good critiques of identity politics, although in my experience DSA types are all in on identity, but I thought Musa made some good arguments why the leftist explanation doesn’t really work. In particular I think he’s right that Occupy Wall Street did a neat trick of redirecting anger towards a small segment of the ultra elite, and leftist critiques of wokeness tend to fall into that same trap of blaming the ultra wealthy for using identity to divide workers.
Additionally it seems like the entire genre of "the elite adopt ideas that harm people but don't suffer the consequences" discourse can be avoided by simply listening to Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys, it's all already there.
Great song. Brings me back to HS.
Ugh...all of these new "bisexuals." LUGs have been a thing for a long time, but their male counterparts are new, and I am already tired of them.
My view: If you are a dude who has never sucked a dick, you ain't bisexual.
Linux User Groups?
Lesbian until graduation. Was real big in the 90s/00s among progressive girls.
I figured that out from context clues :)
I do think there's a difference between "politically queer" heterosexuals and people who actually engage in same-sex relationships before settling down with the opposite sex. There are a number of practical reasons why that tends to happen -- there's less risk of being judged by family, it's easier to start a family of your own, plus the dating pool is larger to begin with. It doesn't mean they were never bisexual to begin with.
Although, I do find it cringe when people in long-term monogamous hetero relationships make a big deal about being bisexual or act like it makes their hetero relationships "more queer". That seems like a straightforward consequence of progressives treating "heterosexual" as a synonym for "evil oppressor" and "queer" as a synonym for "virtuous and special".
I always knew it as BUG (Bi until graduation)
In fairness, the dude in question may not even be bisexual.
He’s just a dude that sucked a dick.
A sexual act isn’t fairy dust that magically changes your sexuality.
Badly phrased: it COULD be fairy dust, I suppose.
I did the experiment in college thing.
Doesn’t bother me. But I now know I am 150% heterosexual.
I highly recommend it for anyone who has one iota of “curiosity”. Get out there and suck a dick. You’ll find out real quick.
"Get out there and suck a dick. You’ll find out real quick."
A overlooked 2024 campaign slogan.
Same. I slept with two very beautiful girls in my twenties and when people say that "all women are a bit bisexual" I know that that's bullshit because it was exactly that experimentation that proved to me I only like men.
You don’t have to suck a dick to be a gay man, but it can’t hurt your cause
If he was just snorting the fairy dust off the D, is he still bisexual?
Excluding the bisexual virgins I guess.
By this standard every virgin is asexual. I don’t wanna be a pedant, but I will, sexuality refers to who you’re attracted to and nothing more.
No, the default is hetero. You don't need to prove you're hetero. You shouldn't need to prove you're gay either, but when you get privilege for identifying as one, you gotta show why it's not stolen valor.
I was disappointed in this episode, but not for the same reasons as most others folks writing on here. I was admittedly skeptical of this episode based on the framing of the "liberal elites unraveling" institutions or whatever. I have yet to hear an elite vs non-elite discourse that doesn't fall into overgeneralizations and attempts shoe horn in political and personal grievance to explain an overly broad world view. I would say this conversation wasn't any different than the many others covering this topic, although I did like this guy better than Rob Henderson, who I think gunning for a position of the next culture warrior public "intellectual".
I can understand the sentiment that drive this world view of elites vs non elites and I don't think those terms are entirely un useful, but I think people tend to lean way to heavily on those categorization to help craft a simplistic world view that is of limited utility. Because of this, I think it often morphs into a fairly problematic world view due this simplistic binary framing of "us vs them", that is mostly useful for stoking people's grievances towards an out group. This is largely the issue with populist politics.
There are elements of what Musa says that ring true to me, but I think when actually dig into those claims he touches they are pretty banal. Is it surprising that managerial types and academics tend to come from higher up the income ladder? Is it surprising that there can be disconnect from people managing an organization and what actually happening on the ground at an organization? Is it surprising that academics social theories tend to fall woefully short what is actually happening in the real world? And none of this is unique to "liberal" circles.
Don't get me wrong, I think these questions can be interesting jumping off point for exploring social structures. For instance I am very open to the idea that our society has shifted towards favoring more managerial types positions, but in the process it has created a large gap between workers and managers of these organizations, with too many top heavy organizations. Just a thought.
Unfortunately, Musa moves towards the elite vs non elite framing that favors that nebulous world view that I think just fails to actually explain much of anything. That framing just favors being able to graft on a lot of personal sentiments and grievances to a world view that doesn't offer much anything practical except creating an in group out group sentiment. It relies on trying paint the elites and non elites as sharing dichotomous world views based on their allotment in life and it is pretty much always bull shit. Go to any given construction site or an office space and I guarantee you will find a range opinions on most political topics. This is another populism sucks as a political philosophy. You just can't divide the world neatly into two opposing camps, as much as people really want to for the convenience of explaining their world view.
I think if you're going try make such broad generalized you should be a lot more cautious on how much reliance you put on those claims. I think Musa is far to reliant on this overly broad world view and as a result I think his thesis comes across pretty weak. I will add this is all based on this interview and it possible that his actual book is much substantive and interesting. However, I do remain skeptical based on this interview and seeing how others have explored this topic.
I agree with this take, for the most part. One issue I saw is that what he’s calling “symbolic capitalists” or “elites” includes way too many people. For example he includes “education” which is one of the largest professions and includes people from every city, town and village in the country and from every political stripe. Yes of course teachers unions can be crap and pass a lot of these dumb ideas around but teachers themselves are not all members of some elite.
I do see a lot of people from my milieu who are very blind to plight of the working classes. Feeling very entitled to 6 figure incomes for a job where they sit at home in front of an computer and maybe do 2-3 hours of real work throughout the day. Or complaining that a $60k salary is unthinkably low and no one can live on that - despite that being well above the median income for a single earner.
What I don’t see is these folks all wanting to be social climbers and to become more elite. Moreso they want to maintain the high standard of living they are used to. So there are some tendencies towards NIMBY ism and like was mentioned favoring lockdowns during COVID. Though that I think varied substantially - I was furious when our local school reduced the number of in person days at the last minute after a few assholes who weren’t sending their kids anyway protested. Despite being exactly the symbolic capitalist type described.
Buddy, you put words to a lot of my feelings about this episode. I found myself really struggling while listening, because it all felt so simplistic and even basic points were incorrect (income inequality has actually decreased recently for instance). My skepticism was really set off quickly with this one.
I pretty much agree word for word with your thoughtful and even-handed analysis. I, too, found myself thinking that this didn’t seem particularly revelatory.
However, like you, I also think that how it came across is an artifact of this being a bird’s-eye-view interview, which inherently is going to be a bit basic. Thanks for your post.
I get the impression that is how more people are starting to view the "elitist" discourse. It is tired explanation that falls short of explaining much of anything
Well, to be generous, I think that some occasions of discourse do offer explanations - though of course how successful the explanations will be will vary (wildly) by occasion. What I think is the main issue is the failure to actually connect and make the explanations palpable or actionable. Like it or not, it is a reasonable duty for those that choose to do the heavy lifting of intellectual work (however loosely defined) to actually try to address their audience in terms they can relate to in order to make meaningful change. (And no, this is not the same as "dumbing down.") This, in my view, is where they often -- but not always - fail to deliver; it's unclear who their actually talking to.
Well we see this bit differently if I understand you correctly. It sounds like you more or less agree with his underlying premise of symbolic capitalist taking over elite institutions and causing them to unravel with their out of touch ideas, or something like that. But it sounds like you mostly reject his overly academic language and don't see it as useful in getting non elites to engage with the topic. Sorry if I am putting words I your mouth, this is just how this read to me.
I mostly reject his underlying premise because I think the elite vs non elite framework that he inevitably slips into is just overly generalized and turns to sloppy thinking. Some of what he touched on could be interesting topics to explore, like that of great awokenings of history (although I don't like leans into culture war lingo). I could see how analyzing these culture moments in history that led public uprisings and cultural shift could be interesting, but I just don't think what he said on topic was very interesting. It came across as slightly dressed up culture war dribble.
Oh, I have no current opinion on his position - I don’t think I know enough about it yet. If it seemed like I was defending him in some way, I wasn’t. I probably wasn’t terribly clear in the message you’re responding to.
I think I was just making the point (maybe just to myself even) that when any topic crosses the line from just plain old conversation to “discourse” (in the negative sense) it doesn’t necessarily turn me off to whatever message might be valuable. It’s just that when things get framed as “DISCOURSE” I tend to lose interest because I feel like the speaker is more interested in speaking to a select audience rather than to actually affect real change. But that’s a fairly negative stance, I admit.
Thanks for writing a really good critique of Musa's argument. I had some similar feelings listening to it, but I have ended up defending him in this comment section because so many of the critical comments seemed incredibly unfair!
I think these sorts of "there are two types of people" frameworks can be useful to help explain specific things to a limited degree, but its very easy to start using them to explain everything. My mum periodically latches on to one of these theories and then applies them way too broadly. First it was 'wolves vs. rabbits' then it was 'antifragility' then the 'uniparty' etc.
I agree, I found most the critical comments to be unfair or silly. A lot of them seem to be premised on him being one of those touch elites he is criticizing. Which it seems like a lot of that sentiment stems from him being coded as left wing based on his opinions about Israel. It comes across very reactionary.
That sort of false binary thinking is so easy to fall into. My mother actually does that all time too haha. I don't mind much in tge light hearted, tongue-in-cheek conversations, but when it takes on the pseudo academic presentation i find it rather troublesome.
Haven't finished the episode yet but I think this is another classic case of Barpod's audience getting cut right down the middle lol. I have enjoyed the episode and I think Musa's framing is interesting.
):
The stupid thing about social justice progressivism (SJP, as Trace describes it) or “wokeness” (in the colloquial sense) is that it disregards what made the left so successful in the past - many vs few. In a democracy it’s way easier to impose concentrated costs for diffuse gains (think progressive taxation from few wealthy people to redistribute to many less wealthy). SJP inverts it - now it’s diffuse costs for concentrated gas (the majority is expected to accede to the demands of ever smaller groups who reap the benefits). Put simply, this is rent seeking - think of the sugar industry which lobbied Congress to impose a quota to protect their business from foreign competition, so now sugar is more expensive and HFCS is used (yuck!). The progression of serf emancipation, slavery abolition, universal suffrage and the civil rights movement means that the vast majority of a) numerous groups and b) sympathetic groups had their concerns handled - so now you’re left with ever less sympathetic groups thinking they should make any demands upon the majority. Of course, the lunatics who believe in SJP think that the majority making any demands (or, god forbid, enforcing them) is “fascism” or “genocide” - both terms they have cheapened.
This is an interesting point. I'm remembering an episode of Coleman Hughes's podcast where he interviewed Keyu Jin who contrasted the US vs China. She noted that US policy will often focus on minority interests, while Chinese policy will tend to focus on the average citizen. That thinking helps to facilitate rapid development, and the Chinese government is then perceived (rightly or wrongly) as more accountable to the average citizen despite its issues. It's admittedly been a while since I listened to it.
I think there is a tendency in the US to prioritize the worst off person, which reflects the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" type of thinking underlying a lot of modern American liberal policy. This has its merits, but things can go awry once people knowingly strive to paint themselves as the most deserving victims.
FYI China has very forceful and formal diversity/Affirmative Action requirements for ethnic minorities. This is a product of wanting to preserve a multi ethnic empire centered around one dominant ethnic group (Han), but it is still far beyond the dreams of the American SJPs.
I'm aware China has affirmative action, but I think she was referring more broadly to interest groups that represent a minority of the population, not necessarily ethnic minorities or even "identity groups". It was more a discussion of what Americans might be missing when it comes to the Chinese perception of the Chinese government. It's been a while since I listened, but the full interview is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ncP_HSpHo
But also, like you allude to, the goal of affirmative action can sometimes be more akin to assimilation than "elevating minority voices" in the modern SJP sense. I don't know enough to say exactly how China's policy goals fit in there (purported or actual).